How many of you are finding it difficult to get images that you can use for free on your websites?
What about I can tell you about a platform where you can easily find images that fall under the Creative Commons License.
I am talking about Openverse, which is a search engine dedicated to find open-licensed media.
Earlier, Openverse was called the CC Search which was launched by the Creative Commons in 2019.
However, for some reason, the Creative Commons team was planning to shut down the CC Search.
When Matt Mullenweg heard about it, he plans to make the search engine operation, and therefore, in April 2021, he announced CC Search is joining WordPress.org.
Later, the CC Search was rebranded and called Openverse.
Openverse to Boost WordPress Media Library
After the acquisition, Automattic hired the key members of CC Search to achieve the company’s future commitment.
In Matt’s blog post, when a reader asked “Will Openverse be the part of WordPress Media Library so that users can easily add free images to their content?” Matt replied, “That is the plan”.
So, we can see that instead of just separately hosting the open-licensed media, Openverse is also going to be part of WordPress core.
Currently, Openverse hosts more than 500 million images collected from over 50 sources and will soon host CC-licensed audio and video as well.
At the time of writing this article, the search engine is available in 10 languages. However, support for more languages will come soon.
Integrating Openverse in WordPress Media Library will not just make the Media Library powerful, but also ease the content creation process. I mean, to add an image in the post, users will not have to leave the WordPress editor.
Right now, Automattic offers the same through its Jetpack plugin. With the Jetpack plugin, we can search images from Pexels right within the media library.
What makes this feature even more beautiful is, the automatic insertion of image credits and alt text.
Damn Productive! Isn’t it?
People can also donate their images to Openverse
Openverse is not just a search engine that provides free-to-use images but it is also a place where you could contribute yours.
People who love open source can donate images to Openverse.
The search engine is 100% open source and one can fork its code easily from GitHub.
If you ask me, then I also personally favor open-source projects as they will give everyone a fair chance to enhance the coding world.
